Let us always remember the Poor Souls in our prayers, especially in November, a month dedicated to them.
From the National Catholic Register
By Joseph O'Brien
Tradition, Scripture, saints, Church Fathers, apologists and poets all contribute to the Church’s patrimony.
Perhaps more than any other teaching of the Catholic Church, the
doctrine of purgatory sets Catholics apart from other Christian
professions.
While all Christians acknowledge the Four Last Things — heaven, hell,
death and judgment — only Catholics understand that between hell and
heaven lies a third, temporary possibility for many souls who, while
dying in a state of grace, must still reform their souls — purge them —
of the residual effects of sin. The reality of purgatory speaks to both
God’s mercy and God’s justice, but also and especially to God’s love
for souls.
As a formal teaching of the Church, purgatory has had a long paper
trail among the Church Fathers and saints and is ultimately grounded in
scriptural evidence honed by Tradition through development of doctrine.
So, while it is easy to see why Protestant thinkers — for whom no
truth of the faith can exist outside of Scripture alone — might exclude
purgatory from the necessary tenets of the faith, once the full teaching
of the Church on this aspect of God’s mercy and justice is understood,
it becomes more difficult to see purgatory as anything but essential to
understanding — and even anticipating with great joy — our ultimate and
most felicitous destiny after death: heavenly enjoyment of God’s eternal
loving presence.
Straight Teaching
The Catechism of the Catholic Church presents the teaching on purgatory as a matter of “final purification.”
“All who die in God’s grace and friendship,” the Catechism states,
“but still imperfectly purified, are indeed assured of their eternal
salvation; but after death they undergo purification, so as to achieve
the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven” (1030). Furthermore,
the Church calls this final purification “purgatory … which is entirely
different from the punishment of the damned” (1031).
The Catechism then notes that the doctrine on purgatory developed
through the interplay of Tradition and Scripture, pointing especially to
the Council of Florence (1431-144) and the Council of Trent (1545-1563)
as instrumental in clarifying the tenets of this doctrine.
The Council of Florence, affirming the traditional teaching on
purgatory, contributed a further refinement to the doctrine in
definitively noting: “The souls of those who have not committed any sin
at all after they received baptism, and the souls of those who have
committed sin, but have been cleansed either while in the body or afterwards …
are promptly taken up into heaven and see clearly the Triune God
himself, just as he is, some more perfectly than others according to
their respective merits” (emphasis added).
Likewise, the Council of Trent, reacting to the wholesale rejection
of belief in purgatory as necessary for salvation by leaders of the
Protestant Revolt — including Martin Luther and John Calvin — sought to
emphasize in its reaffirmation of the doctrine that “souls detained [in
purgatory] are helped by the prayers of the faithful and especially by
the acceptable Sacrifice of the Altar,” that is, the prayers of the
Mass.
Purgative Power of Mass
Explicit reference to this belief in the power of the Mass to aid
souls in purgatory reaches as far back as the third century. So says
Jesuit Father F.X. Schouppe in his book Purgatory: Explained by the Lives and Legends of the Saints.
“The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass was celebrated for the departed,”
Father Schouppe writes, “even from the time of the foundation of the
Church. ‘We celebrate the anniversary of the triumph of the martyrs,’
writes Tertullian in the third century, ‘and, according to the tradition
of our fathers, we offer the Holy Sacrifice for the departed on the
anniversary of their death.’”
Father Schouppe also cites St. Augustine referencing in one of his
sermons the Eucharistic Sacrifice as a powerful ally to souls in
purgatory:
“It cannot be denied … that the prayers of the Church, the Holy
Sacrifice, and alms distributed for the departed, relieve those holy
souls, and move God to treat them with more clemency than their sins
deserve. It is a universal practice of the Church, a practice which she
observes as having received from her forefathers — that is to say, the
Holy Apostles.”
In fact, as Father Schouppe notes, St. Augustine offered a personal witness in The Confessions to
this teaching when his mother St. Monica died. Before her death, when
she took ill, Monica asked Augustine to remember her in his prayers.
“Here you will bury your mother,” Monica told her son, adding when
others expressed concern that she was not going to die in her African
homeland. “Lay this body wherever it may be. Let no care of it disturb
you: This only I ask of you, that you should remember me at the altar of
the Lord wherever you may be.”
Purgatory by the Book
In addition to Tradition, the Catechism also sees the teaching on
purgatory “based on the practice of prayer for the dead already
mentioned in sacred Scripture, including the Old Testament witness of 2
Maccabees 12:46: ‘Therefore [Judas Maccabeus] made atonement for the
dead, that they might be delivered from their sin.’”
But Luther and other Protestant leaders rejected the authority of 2
Maccabees and other Old Testament works they saw as “apocryphal,”
stating that while these other books were edifying to the faithful, they
had no authority to teach Christian doctrine.
Yet, as Catholic apologist Patrick Madrid notes in his book Where Is That In Tradition,
“the doctrine of purgatory was not ‘invented’ by Catholics in the
eleventh or twelfth century as some Protestants and other erroneously
assume. This ancient Christian teaching, that there is a process of
purification that the souls of some of those who die in the state of
friendship with God (cf. Romans 11:22) will undergo, is well attested by
St. Paul in his teaching in 1 Corinthians 3:10-15.”
In this passage, St. Paul indicates a purgation by fire is necessary
for souls not yet prepared to meet the Lord: “Every man’s work shall be
manifest; for the day of the Lord shall declare it, because it shall be
revealed in fire; and the fire shall try every man’s work. Of what sort
it is. If any man’s work abide, which he hath built thereupon, he shall
receive a reward. If any man’s work burn, he shall suffer loss; but he himself shall be saved, yet so as by fire” (1 Corinthians 3:13-15, emphasis added).
There is evidence that Luther himself believed in purgatory, but
since in his view it was not a doctrine solely grounded in Scripture, he
believed it was unnecessary for salvation.
But another Protestant, C.S. Lewis, thought that purgatory and
praying for the dead were sensible doctrines (even if he quibbled with
fellow English writers — and Catholic saints — Thomas More and John
Fisher on the quality, severity and nature of the suffering a soul
experiences in purgatory).
“I believe in purgatory,” Lewis states in one of his letters, in
which he also notes, “Of course I pray for the dead. The action is so
spontaneous, so all but inevitable, that only the most compulsive
theological case against it would deter me. And I hardly know how the
rest of my prayers would survive if those for the dead were forbidden.
At our age the majority of those we love best are dead. What sort of
intercourse with God could I have if what I love best were unmentionable
to Him?”
Lewis notes that purgatory is a way to prepare our own souls — and
anyone who truly loves God ought to desire for the sake of that love
such a time for preparation.
“Our souls demand Purgatory, don’t they?” Lewis asks. “Would
it not break the heart if God said to us, ‘It is true, my son, that
your breath smells and your rags drip with mud and slime, but we are
charitable here and no one will upbraid you with these things, nor draw
away from you. Enter into the joy’? Should we not reply, ‘With
submission, sir, and if there is no objection, I’d rather be cleaned first.’ ‘It may hurt, you know’ — ‘Even so, sir.’”
Purgatory and the Poets
Lewis also notes that without purgatory, literature would be bereft
of two great works that focus on this essential element among the Four
Last Things: Dante’s Purgatorio and St. John Henry Newman’s The Dream of Gerontius.
For Lewis, Newman’s long poem, considered his masterwork in verse,
serves as a modern corrective to viewing purgatory as a “temporary
hell.”
“The right view returns magnificently in Newman’s Dream.” He
writes. “There, if I remember it rightly, the saved soul, at the very
foot of the throne, begs to be taken away and cleansed. It cannot bear
for a moment longer ‘With its darkness to affront that light.’” In
Newman’s poem, Lewis declares, “Religion has reclaimed Purgatory.”
But even Newman’s imaginative work on purgatory is only possible
because of the work of another Catholic poet and one of the greatest in
history — Dante Alighieri.
According to Catholic writer Anthony Esolen, who translated the Modern Library edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy, in
a certain sense, Dante was the first Catholic poet to provide a place
in the human imagination for the reality of purgatory to come alive.
As Esolen writes in the introduction to his translation of the Purgatorio, “For sheer inventiveness, the Purgatorio
is arguably the product of Dante’s most brilliant poetic conception.
There is no denying the grim, oppressive majesty of his hell, full of
the terrible sights of human nobility and beauty ruined.”
But, Esolen adds, “Purgatory is not hell, not even a lighter version
of hell. It is a completely new kingdom.” It was from the “bare tenets”
of purgatory, a place of finite suffering where those being purged can
no longer sin and are assisted by prayer to eventually reach heaven,
that “Dante has created a kingdom, and remarkably, a kingdom that brings
to life the heart and soul of that doctrine.”
Thomistic Take
Yet even Dante had to start somewhere to build this kingdom, and as with most of his Divine Comedy
to ensure that his inspiration was grounded firmly in sound doctrine,
the poet likely relied on his favorite theologian: St. Thomas Aquinas,
who in his Summa Theologiae provides the Church with a profound and succinct statement on the doctrine of purgatory.
After examining objections against the doctrine of purgatory, Thomas
concludes that “it is sufficiently clear that there is a Purgatory after
this life. For the debt of punishment is not paid in full after the
stain of sin has been washed away by contrition, nor again are venial
sins always removed when mortal sins are remitted, and if justice
demands that sin be set in order by due punishment, it follows that one
who after contrition for his fault and after being absolved, dies before
making due satisfaction, is punished after this life.”
While it might seem strange to think of purgatory as “punishment,” as Thomas says in his Compendium of Theology (a kind of summary of the Summa),
punishment is “a medicine for guilt,” which sets a soul’s will in order
“since by guilt man transgresses the limits of the natural order,
giving more to his will than he ought. Hence he is led back to the order
of justice by punishment, through which something is taken away from
his will.”
A great modern student of Thomas Aquinas, Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen
summarized Thomas’ view of purgatory as “that place in which the love
of God tempers the justice of God, and, secondly, where the love of man
tempers the injustice of man.”
Means to an End
Purgatory is, above all, God’s last act of mercy for souls bound for
eternal glory because only in that way can those souls be restored in a
way that God will recognize them.
“It will be an extremely serious business when we meet God face-to-face,” writes Catholic apologist Dave Armstrong in his book Catholic Verses, adding
that, “to stand in his presence, we must be literally, actually
sinless, because that is how we were created to be in the first place,
in his image.”
As Dante notes throughout his Purgatorio, purgatory is
itself only a means, a way station, a depot on the way to someplace and,
more importantly, Someone: God reigning in eternal glory — the same
place and same person on which Dante sets his sights as he emerges from
the purgative waters in the closing lines of his poem:
From its most holy waters I returned
as remade as a new young plant appears
renewed in every newly springing frond,
Pure, and in trim for mounting to the stars.
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